Vietnam Study,
Casting Doubts, Remains SecretBy Scott Shane
The New York Times

Monday 31 October 2005

Washington - The
National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency
historian that during the TonkinGulf
episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately
distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar
with the historian's work say.

The
historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications
intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking
agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had
attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash.
President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to
authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but
most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.

The
N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes
that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of
intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers
had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr.
Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to
cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson
neither knew about nor condoned the deception.

Mr.
Hanyok's findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house
journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it
should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency
policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt
uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war
in Iraq,
according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions
of the matter.

Matthew
M. Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Mr. Hanyok's TonkinGulf
research with current and former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials who have read it,
said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed
they should have been released long ago.

"This
material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and
intelligence reform," said Mr. Aid, who is writing a history of the N.S.A.
"To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is
wrong."

Mr.
Aid's description of Mr. Hanyok's findings was confirmed by the intelligence
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research has not been
made public.

Both
men said Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese
intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work
in N.S.A.'s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered
the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that
they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.

"Rather
than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United
States into a bloody war that would
last for 10 years," Mr. Aid said.

Asked
about Mr. Hanyok's research, an N.S.A. spokesman said the agency intended to
release his 2001 article in late November. The spokesman, Don Weber, said the
release had been "delayed in an effort to be consistent with our preferred
practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective."

Mr.
Weber said the agency was working to declassify not only Mr. Hanyok's article,
but also the original intercepts and other raw material for his work, so the
public could better assess his conclusions.

The
intelligence official gave a different account. He said N.S.A. historians began
pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his TonkinGulf
findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called
"Spartans in Darkness." Though superiors initially expressed support
for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq
intelligence was being called into question, the official said.

Mr.
Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same explanation
for the delay in releasing the report, though neither he nor the intelligence
official knew how high up in the agency the issue was discussed. A spokesman
for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency's. director until last summer and is now the principal deputy
director of national intelligence, referred questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A.
spokesman, who said he had no further information.

Many
historians believe that even without the TonkinGulf
episode, Johnson might have found a reason to escalate military action against North
Vietnam. They note that Johnson
apparently had his own doubts about the Aug. 4 attack and that a few days later
told George W. Ball, the under secretary of state, "Hell, those dumb,
stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!"

But
Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary played a central role in the TonkinGulf
affair, said in an interview last week that he believed the intelligence
reports had played a decisive role in the war's expansion.

"I
think it's wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war," Mr. McNamara said.
"But we thought we had evidence that North
Vietnam was escalating."

Mr.
McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been
altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.

"That
really is surprising to me," said Mr. McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found had
unknowingly used the altered intercepts in 1964 and 1968 in testimony before
Congress. "I think they ought to make all the material public,
period."

The
supposed second North Vietnamese attack, on the American destroyers Maddox and
C. Turner Joy, played an outsize role in history. Johnson responded by ordering
retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnamese targets and used the event to
persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin
resolution on Aug.
7, 1964.

It
authorized the president "to take all necessary steps, including the use
of armed force," to defend South
Vietnam and its neighbors and was used
both by Johnson and President Richard M. Nixon to justify escalating the war,
in which 58,226 Americans and more than 1 million Vietnamese died.

Not
all the details of Mr. Hanyok's analysis, published in N.S.A.'s Cryptologic
Quarterly in early 2001, could be learned. But they involved discrepancies
between the official N.S.A. version of the events of Aug. 4, 1964, and intercepts
from N.S.A. listening posts at Phu Bai in South Vietnam and San Miguel in the
Philippines that are in the agency archives.

One
issue, for example, was the translation of a phrase in an Aug. 4 North
Vietnamese transmission. In some documents the phrase, "we sacrificed two
comrades" - an apparent reference to casualties during the clash with
American ships on Aug. 2 - was incorrectly translated as "we sacrificed
two ships." That phrase was used to suggest that the North Vietnamese were
reporting the loss of ships in a new battle Aug. 4, the intelligence official
said.

The
original Vietnamese version of that intercept, unlike many other intercepts
from the same period, is missing from the agency's archives, the official said.

The
intelligence official said the evidence for deliberate falsification is
"about as certain as it can be without a smoking gun - you can come to no
other conclusion."

Despite
its well-deserved reputation for secrecy, the N.S.A. in recent years has made
public dozens of studies by its Center for Cryptologic History. A study by Mr.
Hanyok on signals intelligence and the Holocaust, titled "Eavesdropping on
Hell," was published last year.

Two
historians who have written extensively on the Tonkin Gulf episode, Edwin E.
Moise of Clemson University and John Prados of the National Security Archive in
Washington, said they were unaware of Mr. Hanyok's work but found his reported
findings intriguing.

"I'm
surprised at the notion of deliberate deception at N.S.A.," Dr. Moise
said. "But I get surprised a lot."

Dr.
Prados said, "If Mr. Hanyok's conclusion is correct, it adds to the tragic
aspect of the Vietnam War." In addition, he said, "it's
new evidence that intelligence, so often treated as the Holy Grail, turns out
to be not that at all, just as in Iraq."